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Review

The Israeli-Palestinian ensemble drama Ajami is thoroughly
polarized and amazingly un-polarizing: No matter which side you’re on,
the brutality will make you sick. Co-directed by an Israeli Jew, Yaron
Shani, and a Palestinian Arab, Scandor Copti, the film is a tapestry of
tragedies that skips between Tel Aviv and the Palestinian territories.
Rash acts of violence lead to rash retaliations, which lead to even
more pointless blowbacks. It’s not a one-to-one, eye-for-an-eye ratio:
The homicidal rage is rather amorphous. Shani and Copti invert the
narrative so that you see the carnage first and only later figure out
the senseless reason someone died.

The
opening scene depicts the senseless assassination by Bedouin
motorcyclists of a Palestinian Arab teenager fixing a car: senseless
because it turns out to be payback for the teen’s uncle’s shooting of a
Bedouin gangster who (senselessly) shot up the uncle’s café; and even
more senseless because the motorcyclists killed the wrong teenager (a
neighbor). Jaffa’s Ajami neighborhood, not far from Tel Aviv, is like
Chicago in the twenties  only worse, because the pressure on
Palestinians comes from their own side as well as Israeli cops and
soldiers. To pay off the Bedouin crime family and keep their
desperately ill mother alive, the young Muslim Omar (Shahir Kabaha) and
his gifted, artistic kid brother, Malek (Ibrahim Frege), need to earn a
lot of cash quickly. So they steal car parts and scam gas money and
slip into Israel proper to work as illegals and end up trying to sell a
large quantity of drugs that has passed from hand to hand in a most
confusing way. Long after the horrifying consequences of their meeting
with an Israeli buyer, the filmmakers are still doubling back to
preceding events and teasing out more of the characters’ motives.

A touch more linearity wouldn’t have hurt: Even accounting for its purposefully puzzling structure, Ajami
is murkier than it needs to be. The film was partially improvised and
shot with handheld cameras, and the actors often blur together 
although that in itself is a source of fascination. We think, Wait 
who are we watching? Are these Arabs or Israelis? Do they really look
that much alike? They do. Shani and Copti downplay outright racism.
It’s more a matter of poverty and class and tribalism and wounded pride
and a climate of vengeance that drives people to violence. Ajami
is all about landmines, metaphorical rather than literal. A barbed but
initially casual exchange between a Jewish patriarch and his young Arab
neighbors grows more and more ugly and explodes into brutality, which
ripples through the neighborhood causing more brutality  and somehow
leads to a good-natured character (played by director Copti) doing
something bizarrely self-destructive, which leads back to Omar and
Malek and their bag of drugs and their collision course with a
grieving, unstable Israeli cop, Dando (played by ex-policeman Eran
Naim).

Apart from Malek, whose haunting sketches evoke his struggle to see
beyond the wretched surface of his life, the characters don’t have much
stature, and the movie peaks too early. But Ajami transcends
its often-mundane mise-en-scène. Palestinian and Israeli parents weep
over dead children whose only guilt was by association  until it hits
you that every interaction in the movie, from the testy to the
murderous, is based on guilt by association.
— David Edelstein